Even the boy who cried “Wolf!” turned out to be right once.

CDC wants to alert everyone about a rise in MIS-C cases since September 1. I thought their graph of MIS-C cases might be a helpful visual. (They seem to have left it out of their alert.) https://t.co/xuVF49po4I https://t.co/1fsFY0dy1u pic.twitter.com/GGuCJk2j5V

— Kelley K (@KelleyKga) December 14, 2023

The CDC may warn us again of something truly scary, but that day is not today. Instead, they dropped a big turd, polished it, and are demanding we admire and then buy it.

The CDC’s “Health Alert” is yet another call for everybody to get vaccinated RIGHT NOW–and triple-vaxxed at that. Not even Double-Jab Swiftie Travis Kelce recommends that we go 3 for 3 in the jab department, but the CDC always likes to push the boundaries.

The need to get everybody, especially children, triple-vaxxed is not just because some nasty viruses are floating around (who knew that viruses float around in Winter?), but particularly because of an alarming rise in MIS-C cases.

…recent increase in cases of multisystem inflammatory syndrome in children (MIS-C) following SARS-CoV-2 infection in the United States has been reported Healthcare providers should administer influenza, COVID-19, and RSV immunizations now to patients

MIS-C is, of course, something one would definitely wish to avoid. And it was a substantial, if not overwhelming, issue in children during the COVID pandemic. It killed relatively few children, but it did happen.

Having a kid’s immune system flare up all over the body is nothing to sneeze at (har-har), but just how alarming is this increase, and will a massive campaign to vaccinate children x3 make a substantial dent in the problem?

The scale of the Y-axis is not multiplied. 50 means 50 cases, and 150 means 150 cases. There is no multiplier, so even the big spikes you see are, in the grand scheme of things, tiny numbers in a country of 350 million. The yellow line is the COVID-19 positivity rate, which is the Y-axis on the right.

Now look at the “spike” we are supposed to be worried about. That “spike is, literally, within the expected noise of the data. There is, for all intents and purposes, no “signal” to distinguish from the noise.

In other words, the spike doesn’t exist except in the most notional sense. Two cases out of 350 million rises to three, and it is a 50% increase; it also isn’t meaningful in the least. With numbers like that going from 1 case to 4 is a 400% spike, and…so what? Statistically, it is the same as zero cases in practical terms.

So the health emergency we are being alerted to doesn’t exist. And the advice they give is, to say the least, backed by zero data. They pretty much admit that their recommendations are based not on science but WAGs.

What if a patient or their parent has questions or concerns? The CDC has a "conversation guide" if patients have questions. Let's say a parent is worried about safety (maybe for their teenaged son?). The suggested response is "vaccinations are safe." pic.twitter.com/8ykIBumsR4

— Kelley K (@KelleyKga) December 14, 2023

None of this should surprise us I suppose. The CDC gave up being a science-driven organization sometime in the past. You might believe it happened during the pandemic, but there is no evidence that a dramatic shift occurred in January 2020. It probably happened during the Obama Administration or before. We just got to see the results in 2020 and beyond as the CDC started getting major scrutiny.

In other words, they aren’t trustworthy and haven’t been for a while. They don’t even appear serious anymore, as you can tell when you watch the new CDC Director lecture us. She looks and sounds like a chirpy schoolgirl, not a serious scientist.

Virus season is here! Hear the latest. https://t.co/4jNWBWWzzl pic.twitter.com/RkMVttAygw

— Mandy K. Cohen, MD, MPH (@CDCDirector) December 6, 2023

That is because she thinks like a chirpy schoolgirl and not a serious scientist. She led efforts against COVID as Secretary of the North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services during the pandemic and beclowned herself as she explained how she and others made decisions at the state level. It was a clown show.

The CDC can start winning trust back by replacing the current @CDCDirector with someone who cares about making public health about science again, and not about what your girlfriends tell you on the phone. https://t.co/aQJx9gCwyq pic.twitter.com/O2IydT8mnX

— Kevin Bass PhD MS (@kevinnbass) September 18, 2023

It’s all well and good for those who spend a lot of time doing research to tell others to do the same, but as a practical matter, most of us outsource such tasks to others with the expectation that those in charge will do so with more than a little care and basic honesty.

We should be able to trust the CDC. It’s not like everybody has the time to research every choice, so we take cues from those around us whom we can trust. That is how life actually works most of the time.

Unfortunately, it has become clear that our government officials are not trustworthy in the least. They are deeply unserious and willing to lie to us for their own purposes. The fact that Mandy Cohen, who admits she decided on what freedoms her citizens may or may not have to live their lives based on whims, is now in charge of the CDC is genuinely scary.

And that the CDC instructs doctors to essentially deceive their patients about what science says is scarier still.

But there it is. This is the world we live in.

The CDC, as with so much of government today, is, at best, worthless and, in many cases, an active hindrance to those who need to make serious choices informed by the best available data.

So the best advice is: do the research yourself or find somebody you can trust to help you make decisions. The CDC is going to be no help at all.